Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [0]
Adams is one of those rare treasures: an author who, one senses, has as much fun writing as one has reading…. Inventive and thoroughly hilarious.”
—The Arizona Daily Star
“The universe, the parallel universes, the pasts, the presents, and the futures, indeed the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash is hilariously up for grabs in Mostly Harmless.”
—The Denver Post
“A winner… The humor is hilarious, the cliff-hangers are cliff-hanging, and overall it’s classic Hitchhiker’s shtick…. For those of you wondering about Elvis’s whereabouts-well, read Mostly Harmless.”
—The Boston Phoenix
“What’s such fun is how amusing the galaxy looks through Adams’s sardonically silly eyes.”
—Detroit Free Press
“[Adams’s] ingenious wit still captivates, and his characters frolic through the galaxy with infectious joy.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Books by Douglas Adams
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING
SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH
DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY
THE LONG DARK TEA-TIME OF THE SOUL
MOSTLY HARMLESS
THE SALMON OF DOUBT
THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
THE ORIGINAL HITCHHIKER RADIO SCRIPTS
THE MEANING OF LIFF (with John Lloyd)
LAST CHANCE TO SEE (with Mark Carwardine)
THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF (with John Lloyd)
Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.
For Ron
With grateful thanks to Sue Freestone and
Michael Bywater for their support,
help and constructive abuse.
Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
Chapter 1
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can’t. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there.
So, by and large, the peoples of the Galaxy tended to languish in their own local muddles and the history of the Galaxy itself was, for a long time, largely cosmological.
Which is not to say that people weren’t trying. They tried sending off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in distant parts, but these usually took thousands of years to get anywhere. By the time they eventually arrived, other forms of travel had been discovered which made use of hyperspace to circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it was that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got there.
This didn’t, of course, deter their crews from wanting to fight the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they’d had a couple of thousand years’ sleep, they’d come a long way to do a tough job and, by Zarquon, they were going to do it.
This was when the first major Muddles of Galactic history set in, with battles continually reerupting centuries after the issues they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However, these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles started preempting hundreds of years